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Thanks Re: st: RE: contract command


From   SamL <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Thanks Re: st: RE: contract command
Date   Wed, 26 Jun 2002 10:07:15 -0700 (PDT)

Thanks for your helpful response.

Sam

On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, Nick Cox wrote:

> SamL
> 
> > I am using the -contract- command to make a smaller version of a very very
> > large file on a unix system.  The file is so large that I may need to use
> > virtual memory. The large file is also sorted by most of the variables
> > that I will -contract- on, hence, cases with the same values are clustered
> > together.  My question is whether there is a way to make -contract- take
> > advantage of this clustering.  I anticipate that if this is possible only
> > one pass of the data will be needed, whereas if it is not possible, I am
> > not sure how many passes will be needed.  As the file is over 7GB,
> > contains more than 10 million cases, and may necessitate the use of
> > virtual memory, any such savings would be substantial. Any assistance is
> > greatly appreciated.
> >
> 
> -contract- is really quite a simple command. To
> understand this and any other answers better,  you
> should type
> 
> which contract
> 
> to find out where contract.ado is on your system
> and then use a text editor (Stata's own -doedit-
> will do fine) to look at the code.
> 
> Specifically,
> 
> 1. At the heart of -contract- is a -sort- on
> the varlist supplied, and to the extent that
> the data are already sorted, that will go faster,
> but I doubt that menory use is affected.
> 
> 2. There aren't any special tweakable options
> to -contract- to affect memory use.
> 
> 3. If you didn't need some of the features
> of -contract-, you could write your own
> slimmed down version, but my guess is that
> the effect on memory will be slight.
> 
> To say more would, I guess, need more knowledge of
> Stata's handling of memory with very large
> files than I possess.
> 
> Nick


> [email protected]
> 
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